ABOUT THE AUTHOR

 

Jerry C. Wagner is the founder (1981) and president of Flexible Plan Investments, Ltd.

 

ABOUT THE POLITICAL SEASONAL INDEX DATABASE

 

In 1999 Jerry Wagner began working with writer Susan Ward at the weekly financial news magazine Barron’s to produce a series of columns on Flexible Plan’s Political Seasonality Index (PSI).

 

In the first issue of each year, they would show a chart of the turning points in the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) for the year ahead based on the twists and turns of the PSI. In the final issue of the year, they would republish the forecast chart from January and overlay the actual chart of the Dow during the past year and see how closely the Dow followed the predicted course.

 

For example, Susan Ward wrote in the final Barron’s of 2000:

 

A contortionist would have had a hard time following the twists and turns of the Dow in the year just past. But those who kept an eye on Jerry Wagner's Political Seasonality Index, introduced to Barron's readers a year ago (December 27, 1999, and January 3, 2000), would have had an easier time keeping it all straight.

 

A few years later FPI made the Index an exclusive part of its weekly Market Hotline and created a strategy that enabled FPI client accounts to be traded based on the PSI’s turning points.

 

The PSI is much the same as when it was created in the 1990s. Back then FPI produced a DJIA history of daily price changes that went all of the way back to 1885. We then overlaid the status of various events, some seasonal (day of the week or month of the year, for example) and some political (for example, which party controlled the presidency, the House, and the Senate, etc.).

 

This allowed us to find the historical daily percent change in the DJIA for any mixture of future events (for example, what did the DJIA do on average on the third Tuesday in March when the president was a Democrat and the Congress was controlled by the Republicans?). Originally there were 11 events tracked in the PSI. A few years ago, we added two more.

 

With a new election year upon us, we thought it might be interesting to use all of the data we’ve collected and see what it tells us about the likely path of markets when viewed under solely a political lens. This will be completely nonpartisan. No political viewpoints will be voiced, just statistics, but there will be plenty for partisans of all stripes to point to in support of their own particular point of view.

 

ABOUT FLEXIBLE PLAN INVESTMENTS, LTD.

 

Since 1981, Flexible Plan Investments has been dedicated to preserving and growing wealth through dynamic risk management. We are a turnkey asset management program (TAMP), which means advisors can access and combine our many risk-managed strategies within a single account. Our fee-based separately managed accounts can provide diversified portfolios of actively managed strategies within equity, debt, and alternative asset classes on an array of different platforms. We also offer advisors our OnTarget Investing tool to help set realistic, custom benchmarks for clients and regularly measure progress.